Are AI Chatbots Spreading Misinformation to US Voters?
Are AI chatbots quietly shaping the perceptions of U.S. voters? Voters trying to educate themselves about candidates “are unknowingly being served partisan talking points in the guise of neutral news summaries,” write two news researchers in Politico magazine:

Leading AI chatbots cite partisan websites masquerading as independent local news outlets nearly half o … ⌘ Read more

KDE and GNOME Developers Ponder How to Handle AI-Generated Contributions
Last weekend KDE’s annual Akademy conference included a presentation proposing
an AI-native KDE,” writes The Register. This led KDE developer Nate Graham to open a discussion about proposed restrictions on LLM-assisted contributions which “rapidly became heated. Moderators issued warnings, restricted further comments, and eventual … ⌘ Read more

AI Finds So Many Linux Bugs, Canonical Changes to a Two-Week Stable Release Update Cycle
“Finding vulnerabilities faster also puts pressure on Linux distributions to fix and deliver patches faster,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli

AI has transformed bug discovery from “a manual, time-intensive process into a highly automated engine,” notes Canonical’s blog, leading to a “recent expl … ⌘ Read more

Is Microsoft Quietly Killing Off Its ‘Copilot+ PC’ Brand?
“Copilot+ PCs” were Microsoft’s official branding for Windows 11 “AI PCs” that met their system requirements. But the 2024 launch “didn’t go smoothly,” writes Windows Central, after security researchers discovered its proposed “Recall” feature was woefully insecure:

This pretty much tarnished the Copilot+ PC brand, and over the last two years more and more OEMs h … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I like it! Even the accidents. So pretty! How long did it take you to write this?

OpenAI, Anthropic CEOs Urge UN Countries to Cooperate on AI Safety Standards
“The heads of major AI firms pleaded with the United Nations on Wednesday to save the world or at least its people — by somehow regulating the fast-expanding technology that they have been designing,” writes the Associated Press.

“If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” said Dario Amodei, c … ⌘ Read more

‘Coyote vs. Acme’ Outgrosses All But 3 WB Movies This Year, Heads To Profit
The movie Coyote vs. Acme earned more than Warner Bros.’ $30 million tax write-off in just two weeks. And last week the movie officially earned more than its production budget of $70 million. But today the movie passed the $100 million mark. “You asked for it, we delivered, and you showed up!” distributor Ketchum Entert … ⌘ Read more

As KDE Turns 30, Contributors and Commits are Going Strong
“In a few weeks, KDE will turn 30 years old,” writes core contributor Kevin Ottens, celebrating with some special KDE community data analytics (including a 30-year graph of the number of contributors):

It peaks around 180 on average (and sometimes reaches towards around 200 people) then shrinks again hitting bottom around 110 persons on average in 2017… Si … ⌘ Read more

Customer-Losing Flock Now Offers Buyouts to Avoid Laying Off Employees
Mashable writes:

Flock Safety offered employees voluntary buyouts on Friday, WIRED reported… Without the buyouts, those familiar with the situation suspect the company would have to lay off some of its 1,500 employees.

WIRED writes that people familiar with the program “say they believe that a significant number of the startup’s ro … ⌘ Read more

Developer Abandons ‘PS5 Linux’ Project After Sony Patches AI-Discovered Exploit
“In April this year, we saw Andy Nguyen turning the PS5 into a Linux-powered gaming PC,”
writes the blog It’s FOSS.

It ran Steam games and emulators using the PS5’s on-board hardware. But this week Andy announced he’s “stopping all my work on PS5 Linux” and “stepping away from the PS5 scene.”
stopping work on porting … ⌘ Read more

Gemini Breached Three Outside Systems, and Claude-Using Researchers Breached OpenAI
“Software security researchers used Anthropic’s Claude AI platform to hack OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool,” reports CBS News.
Using Claude, “On July 25, 2026, we chained two critical vulnerabilities to compromise multiple OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts,” write researchers at security platform Hacktron AI. “With these ac … ⌘ Read more

Has the James Web Space Telescope Discovered a New ‘Black Hole Star’?
The James Webb Space Telescope has been picking up little red dots in almost every image,
writes Quanta magazine. And now two teams of astronomers propose they’re looking at a new astronomical object: a black hole star. It shines with the light of billions of suns — and hides a black hole in its core.

But Quanta adds that “not everyone … ⌘ Read more

Journalist Calls Out ‘Collective Amnesia’ of Schools’ Romance With Big Tech Over AI
“Turns out, Silicon Valley isn’t especially altruistic,” writes the nonprofit education news site The 74. They’re reading a new book promising “the inside story of how Big Tech catalyzed, co-opted, and ultimately came to capture computer science and AI education in America”. Written by
New York Times business re … ⌘ Read more

Crash-Safe & Copy-On-Write GEFS As The “Good Enough File-System” For OpenBSD
Ori Bernstein announced an early preview of his Good Enough File-System “GEFS” for OpenBSD. GEFS is a crash-safe, snapshotting, copy-on-write file-system that he wrote initially for 9front and now porting to OpenBSD… ⌘ Read more

I never thought I’d ever get scammed by an Amazon counterfeit product in my life 🤦‍♂️ I suppose with all the many 10’s of thousands of items sold there every day (and all the junk) I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later. I just tested a couple of USB Flash drives that were being sold as 512G, but were in fact only internally 8G, you write past the 8G and try to read those bytes back and you get a whole pile of zero’s back 🤣

Malicious OpenAI Agents Linked to RubyGems Campaign That Gained RCE on RubyDoc Servers in May
A swarm of OpenAI agents launched a “major malicious attack” against RubyGems last May, according to a new report. That coordinated attack hit Ruby’s package manager “with hundreds of junk gems, prompting the maintainers to suspend new user sign-ups for about four days,” writes The Hacker News, … ⌘ Read more

Three Cities, 16 Years And $1 Billion Later, ‘Defiant’ Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Opens To Mixed Reviews
It looks like a spaceship hovering over South Los Angeles, writes CNN, with futuristic tube-like elevators and an exhibition of Banksy murals. There’s a room featuring Luke Skywalker’s X-34 Landspeeder, but in its gardens there’s a 19th-century cast of a scu … ⌘ Read more

Instead of Fighting AI, Some Teachers Work It Into Their Lessons
Last year the writing program at the University of Baltimore used an app that tracks students while they’re writing in Google Docs, offering teachers a video playing back revisions “with a scoreboard of all the edits, pastes and minutes spent on it,” writes the Washington Post. “Is it surveillance? Yes, I think obviously,” says the program’s direc … ⌘ Read more

‘She Lost Her Sight. Her Billionaire Father Bet On a Daring New Treatment.’
“Billionaire Bill Ackman’s life was upended this February when his 26-year-old daughter collapsed in her Brooklyn apartment, suffering a brain hemorrhage that would render her unable to move, speak or see,” writes the Washingon Post. But then…

The hedge fund manager did what any good father would do — at least, any father … ⌘ Read more

US Military Disables Ad Trackers On Devices To Protect Troops
Slashdot reader DeanonymizedCoward writes: Reuters reports that the US Military is disabling ad tracking on devices, to prevent adversaries from buying publicly-available tracking data to assist in targeting troops. Military officials say that they have disabled trackers on a variety of computers and mobile devices, according to letters released on Frid … ⌘ Read more

How US Campaigns Are Already Using AI to Try to Sway Voters
39 U.S. congressional candidates “reported paying for an OpenAI subscription this election cycle,” writes the Washington Post, citing campaign finance disclosures.

This means the campaigns “are using the technology to court voters — despite limits imposed by leading AI companies to protect elections from the technology’s risks.”

Two [candidates] sai … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Agents Hijacked a German Wiki to Discuss Ways to Escape Their Sandbox
Citing researchers published Friday, Ars Technica writes that AI agents “posted 18,000 messages to a public wiki that discussed ways for other agents to bypass security sandbox restrictions.”

Reuters attributes the discussion to “a swarm of rogue OpenAI agents” that “hijacked a German website this spring and transformed it into … ⌘ Read more

“Yes, no AI is now a feature” - LibreOffice / The Document Foundation
Something I found interesting that deserved a write-up this morning is the blog post from LibreOffice / The Document Foundation on no AI being a feature.

Image

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more

Audacity 4 Rebuilds the Open Source Audio Editor But Leaves Some Features Behind
BrianFagioli writes: Audacity 4.0 has been released with a rebuilt Qt interface, a new clip-editing model, customizable workspaces, native high-DPI rendering, and a new AUP4 project format. The open source audio editor also adds ASIO playback and recording support to official Windows builds, while bringing major cha … ⌘ Read more

Perplexity Will Open Source Its Faster Lily AI Engine For Apple Silicon
BrianFagioli writes: Perplexity has built a local artificial intelligence engine designed specifically for Apple silicon and the Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model. Called Lily, the engine uses a Rust runtime and custom Metal kernels, with neither PyTorch nor MLX in its execution path. Perplexity says Lily averaged 23 percent faster pro … ⌘ Read more

Instrument Clusters Are Now Paid Extras In Two Hyundai Models
“Enshittification of car controls [is] rapidly accelerating,” writes longtime Slashdot reader sinij, pointing to a new report from Car and Driver. From the report: Remember when iPhones used to come with free headphones and a phone charger (including the wall plug)? It didn’t feel so much like Apple giving you free goodies as it did that the company … ⌘ Read more

WinBtrfs 1.10 Released With Two Years Worth Of Improvements For Btrfs On Windows
WinBtrfs is a driver for Microsoft Windows to support reading and writing to Btrfs file-systems. WinBtrfs works with Windows XP and newer. It hadn’t seen a new release in over two years but a big feature release is now available with a combination of new features and bug fixes… ⌘ Read more

Amazon’s HR Lead Uses AI Tool to Write 100,000 Lines of Code - 25 Years After She Last Coded
In an Amazon News blog post, their HR leader describes using AI to write 100,000 lines of code — 25 years after she last coded. “Do you know how empowering it is to realize that after 25 years away from coding, you can actually build again?” First she built a calendar app for her family, … ⌘ Read more

Citrix Adds a Linux-Powered Escape Hatch For Compromised Windows PCs
Citrix’s Desktop as a Service (DaaS) product includes a lightweight, hardened second operating system called UniconOS (once called “eLux”) to offer Windows customers a write-protected file system Citrix says is secure against computer viruses and other malware. Nerds.xyz reports:

According to the company, the environment remains isolated f … ⌘ Read more

New York City 911 System Missed 1,700 Calls Due To Software Update
Longtime Slashdot reader belmolis writes: Part of New York City’s 911 emergency system was offline from about 3:13 a.m. to 10 a.m. on August 18th due to a software update, according to Medical Daily. Of 5,659 calls to the Bronx call center during that period, about 1,700 calls connected but could not be heard by emergency operators. Some were … ⌘ Read more

Is ChatGPT Changing How You’re Writing?
An anonymous reader quotes a report fro SFGATE: From “rizz” to “meat proxy,” words and phrases have fallen in and out of favor for centuries. Culture, politics and technological development have long influenced these trends, and now, new research shows that ChatGPT is beginning to influence how humans communicate. The findings from a team at the Pew Research Center show how, in a short time since OpenA … ⌘ Read more

Trump Declares National Emergency to Ban Some Foreign Grid Equipment
Longtime Slashdot reader dhartshorn writes: Foreign-produced “bulk power” equipment is now effectively banned, and the list of what constitutes such equipment is essentially everything used to make up the grid… much of which we are heavily dependent on foreign sources to supply. In a Wednesday executive order, President Trump said forei … ⌘ Read more

Windows Backdoor ‘Sleepwalker’ Hides in Memory Until Activated by a ‘Magic Packet’
“The Register has a story about a Windows backdoor that waits silently in memory for a ‘magic packet’ before springing into action,” writes Slashdot reader fred133. “No outgoing traffic, just waiting…” From the report: Like a sleeper cell awaiting activation, a never-before-seen Windows backdoor dubbed Sleepwalker w … ⌘ Read more

23 Years After SimCity 4’s Release, ‘Eternal Commuter’ Bug Finally Fixed
“It began life just a year after SimCity 4’s 2003 launch,” writes the blog PCGamesN. “Now, over 20 years later, it’s still going strong with the arrival of Network Addon Mod update 50.”

The SimCity 4 Network Addon Mod, or simply ‘NAM’ among the community, has long been a de facto recommendation to anyone looking to pick up the class … ⌘ Read more

Firefox Announces Free VPN and ‘Startpage’ Search Engine Rolling Out to Android, iOS - Plus GeForce NOW Support
Firefox 154 “brings a number of usability improvements,” writes PC World:

The free built-in VPN, introduced with Firefox 149, continues to offer a selection of virtual locations — temporarily extended to 28 countries until the end of August… The free VPN … ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds Endures A Debug Session From Hell, ‘Enormously Helped’ By AI
Linus Torvalds says AI “enormously helped” him track down a stubborn Intel Xe graphics driver bug that took 24 debugging patches and 18 kernel boots to isolate. “I’d like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it, … ⌘ Read more

PINE64 Halts Linux Device Production Amid DRAM and EMMC Shortages
BrianFagioli writes: PINE64 has some very bad news for Linux hardware fans. PINE64 says it has no plans to produce additional Linux devices in the near future because of the ongoing DRAM and eMMC shortage. Future production will depend on component pricing after mid 2027, while existing PineNote and PineTab2 inventory could run out in rough … ⌘ Read more

Two Very Exciting Memory Management Optimizations Going Into Linux 7.3
Andrew Morton on Tuesday sent out all of the memory management “MM” updates for the Linux 7.3 merge window. The MM pull was particularly heavy as he noted 1,250 “added-to-MM” emails were sent out this cycle compared to 920 the prior cycle. With a lot of patch churn, he also turned to Google’s Gemini AI for writing his patch summaries. In going through the very verbose AI-generated summary, there are two patch series that get me excited on the performance … ⌘ Read more

Top Album Releases Linked To Rise In Fatal Crashes
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The release of a new album by Taylor Swift might be a cause for celebration among her fans, but such events have also been linked to a more sombre phenomenon: an increase in fatal car crashes. The team behind a new study say it sheds light on the impact of distracted driving. Writing in the journal Jama Network … ⌘ Read more

XFS Lands FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES For Efficiency Improvement In Linux 7.3
The XFS file-system improvements have been merged for Linux 7.3. For end-users the only notable change for this file-system on the new kernel is adding support for FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES… ⌘ Read more

Solar Power and Batteries Have Been Keeping Europe’s Grid Stable
AleRunner writes: “Solar has been doing the ‘heavy lifting’ to help Europe meet its energy needs amid a string of blistering heatwaves,” Euronews tells us. Meanwhile, as Europe’s energy demands rise with the heat, jellyfish have been causing shutdowns and reduced power output at multiple reactors at French nuclear plants, as we already discuss … ⌘ Read more

Could a Disc-Free PlayStation Actually Lower Game Prices?
“As Sony soldiers ahead with their plans to end hard copies for new PlayStation games, players are fearing a future which will force them to pay more and own less,” writes Kotaku.

What will prices do in a world with no physical copies to share or sell? One former Square Enix executive speculates this could actually drive down the price of games:

“Digital on … ⌘ Read more

It’s Not Just RAM: Windows Licenses Are Also Pushing Up PC Prices
It’s not just RAM prices that are going up, writes CNET. “Reports suggest the cost of Windows licenses for manufacturers is rising by up to 10%.”

Several sites that closely follow Microsoft news, including Windows Central and Windows Latest, have published articles citing a report from Taiwan’s Economic Daily News that claims some PC manufac … ⌘ Read more

Why Are Big Tech CEOs Writing Long Manifestos About AI?
This week Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500 word open letter titled “The Future is for Everyone”.

But the BBC is more interested in why big tech executives keep writing manifestos about AI:

[Zuckerberg’s] vision echoes what AI leaders have expressed in various forms: the product they are building is among the “most important technologies in history.” Marc A … ⌘ Read more

Oh man wow 😮 Problem 9 was quite hard 😱 I had to build two new functions in the Mu stdlib for computing combinations and permutations, but then the combinations of range(1000) for triples such as a + b == c is enormous! So i had to write iterator versions of these to do lazy evaluation. Anyway solution follows:

#!/usr/bin/env mu

// Special Pythagorean Triplet

import "iter"

fn usage() {
  print("Usage:", args()[0], "<n>")
}

fn sqr(x) { x * x }

fn main() {
  if len(args()) < 2 {
    usage()
    exit(1)
  }

  n := must(int(args()[1]))
  print("n:", n)

  // For a < b < c and a + b + c == n, both a and b are strictly less
  // than n/2. Generate only (a,b) combinations and derive c directly. This
  // keeps the search lazy and reduces n=1000 from C(999,3) = 165,668,499
  // candidate triples to C(499,2) = 124,251 candidate pairs.
  pairs := iter.combinations(iter.range(1, n / 2), 2)

  triples := iter.map(pairs, fn(xs) {
    a := xs[0]
    b := xs[1]
    return [a, b, n - a - b]
  })

  // Enforce b < c; a < b is already guaranteed by combinations over an
  // increasing range, and a + b + c == n holds by construction.
  triples = iter.filter(triples, fn(xs) {
    return xs[1] < xs[2]
  })

  // Euler 9 has one answer for n=1000. find() stops the entire upstream
  // iterator chain as soon as the first Pythagorean triple is found.
  answer := iter.find(triples, fn(xs) {
    return sqr(xs[0]) + sqr(xs[1]) == sqr(xs[2])
  })

  print(answer)

  if answer != nil {
    print(answer[0] * answer[1] * answer[2])
  }
}

main()

It is such a nice feeling that Mu is such a capable little language 😅 And I decided to write code code in Mu by hand 🤚 haha 🤣 and start solving Project Euler problems, like Problem 8 which works out to be a nice elegant solution in Mu:

#!/usr/bin/env mu

// Largest Product in a Series

import "fp"
import "sys"

fn usage() {
  print("Usage: cat |", args()[0], "<n>")
}

fn products(xs) {
  return fp.reduce(xs, 1, fn(x, y) {
    if y == nil {
      return x
    }
    return x * y
  })
}

fn main() {
  if len(args()) < 2 {
    usage()
    exit(1)
  }

  s := must(sys.read_all(0))
  if len(s) == 0 {
    usage()
    exit(1)
  }

  n := must(int(args()[1]))
  r := fp.max(fp.map(fp.sliding(fp.map(s, int), n), products))
  print(r)
}

main()

University of Michigan Drops First-Semester Grades to ‘Curb Mental Health Crisis’
“In order to salve the mental health of freshman students, the University of Michigan has implemented a Pass/No Credit system for new students to improve their mental health,” writes Slashdot reader Ol Olsoc. “The process, called ‘Grade Covering,’ is aimed at helping with the mental health crisis that students face … ⌘ Read more

Freenet Creator Ian Clarke Shares Progress on Its New Decentralized Network
Ian Clarke (aka ancient Slashdot reader Sanity), designer of the peer-to-peer communication platform Freenet, is back with an update on the project’s progress following the launch of its P2P network in March. He writes: Earlier this year, Slashdot covered the launch of the completely redesigned Freenet. I recently gave a tal … ⌘ Read more

Reddit Bans 11-Year Account for GPL Game Post, Testing the EU’s DSA
Longtime Slashdot reader DF5JT writes: On July 26, I posted a single announcement in r/backgammon: GNU Backgammon for Android, GPLv3, the first standalone backgammon engine on F-Droid. Reddit’s spam filter removed the post and permanently banned my 11-year, 30,000-karma account – the result is publicly visible at reddit.com/user/OE1FEU. To t … ⌘ Read more

Privacy Backlash Explodes Against Meta’s Smart Glasses
With nearly 70% of the market, “Meta wants its smart glasses to be a big hit,” writes the Los Angeles Times. But after some users found ways to disable the light that warns people they’re being filmed, “the high-tech specs have also turned into a liability, as some are calling the gadget ‘pervert glasses…’”

Some people are using the glasses — which look like a pair … ⌘ Read more